Frontier Life in 1800's Canada

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5 books

When I moved to Kingston, Ontario, Canada, in 2001, I was amazed to find how this city, unlike many North American cities, has preserved and celebrated its past. It’s in the architecture, the streets, the fabric, and the soil. As someone with a deep love of reading and exploring history, I immediately began to research my new home. I didn’t discover the sort of bloodless accounts often taught in school, replete with dates and facts. This history simmers and boils; full of tales of pirates and officers, gadflies and ne’er-do-wells, countless plucky frontiersmen and women. There is enough raw material for a thousand novels.

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Roughing it in the Bush

Or, Life in Canada

Susanna Moodie, 2011

The gold standard source for what life was like for the hardy souls arriving in Upper Canada in the early 19th century. Although writing from a position of relative privilege, Moodie writes of hardships and deprivations that make the modern reader blanch. We wonder whether we could have survived what she and her family endured. She writes with richness and great humanity so that we can vividly imagine what it must have been like for her to be taken from the relatively comfortable life she’d known and to make a life in the bush. Despite her trials and tribulations, she comes to have a great love for the beauty and wildness of her adopted home.

"A Troublesome Berth" The Journal of First Lieutenant Charles Allan Parker

The Journal of First Royal Marines: The Canada Years, 1838-1840

Robert J. & Art Andrews (Rosalyn Parker), Rosalyn Parker Art, Kingston Historical Society (Ont.), 2009

I used Parker’s journal extensively in my research for Bottle and Glass. It is the account of a British officer arriving in the Canadian wilderness for the first time. Parker’s style is very much modern and journalistic, giving an immediacy to the wonder and apprehension he has for his new surroundings. The reader is right there with him, marveling over the rudeness of frontier life. A representative quote: “Kingston is one of the dirtiest, or rather muddiest places I have ever been in, even in my extensive peregrinations; it is the worst lighted, and most miserably paved place I have ever been in… the number of masterless dogs prowling about the streets at all times is abominable, the quantity of pigs laying in every corner is disgusting in the extreme, and the number of cattle roaming about the streets with their inexpressive countenances is really, really past bearing!

Kingston

The King's Town

James A. Roy, 1952

A Gentleman’s Bottle Companion

A collection of eighteenth century bawdy ballads

Lonesome Dove

Larry McMurtry, 2010

Lonesome Dove is not, of course, set in Upper Canada. It takes place in the American West. But, it is a wonderful, sprawling epic featuring a wide cast of colourful characters making their way in the frontier of the 19th century. The story follows Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call, two retired Texas Rangers, as they drive cattle north to Montana. Along the way, a fascinating array of people come into their orbit. McMurtry’s portrayal of each character, however minor, is rich and masterful. You find yourself thinking and worrying about them long after you have finished reading. It’s been twenty years since I first read Lonesome Dove and I still have sudden vivid recollections of it, as though I’d been there myself with McCrae and Call, driving the cattle. When I began work on Bottle and Glass, Lonesome Dove was my model.